Day 6 of the NPD course was delivered by Michael Gutierrez PERA/Supply London. He was focusing on the legislation and liability that comes with being a manufacturer/designer/distributor. I am beginning to realise from this and the previous intellectual property modules, that design is as much about having a good lawyer as it is about innovation. Saying that, the key to getting the best bang-for-your-buck from your legal assets seems to be using them early in your development process. If you can afford legal cover/advice at the front-end it can save you a lot of money if things turn to custard. This is what lawyers like to call “risk-management”, because legalities are going to get your money at some point. It is best to give the beast a sacrifice rather than taking a chance with it eating you alive.

Liability is a two edge sword when designing a product. One side means you have to be thorough when designing/manufacturing to make sure your products are all that you claim they are. On the other hand you have deal with the foreseeable miss-use of your product. This means, the idiot who is using the chainsaw you designed, up a ladder with one hand in the rain, has to be catered for. Unfortunately you obviously can’t design the incompetent user out of a product, hence the myriad of seemingly obvious warning labels on most products. The above chainsaw case was just settled in an American court and the man walked away with a big settlement, along with another a case where a lady sued McDonald’s because she slipped on the wet floor and broke her tail-bone. Not that bad? Yes it is when you take into account she had just thrown the offending cup of coke on her boyfriend.

All this ‘liable’ madness came about because a snail found its way into a ginger beer bottle. If you have done any sort of law training I am sure you have heard of the Donohuge vs Stevenson case. Basically the story goes; One lady buys another lady a ginger beer, the second lady drinks the ginger beer and finds a dead snail in the bottle. The second lady gets a bit angry and decides to take the ginger beer bottler to court. This sounds pretty standard but before this case you could only take action if you were the actual purchaser of the product and since her friend had brought her the drink she had no case. However, it got all the way to the House of Lords where they opened Pandora’s box and set a new precedent for the modern tort of negligence, hence our current system of law.

All and all an interesting day but I am glad to see the back of the legal matters for now. I do see the need for lawyers and “rules”, but I prefer the fun stuff.